Squarepusher – Be Up a Hello (Warp)

Tom Jenkinson returns with his first album as Squarepusher in five years and it’s a confident ride through his particularly wobbly drill n bass electronics

Squarepusher is on brilliant, elastic form with Be Up a Hello. His signature sound – rubbery hardcore wetly tumbling forever down and around an Escher flight of stairs – is at its most grin inducing, stomach-left-behind-on-a-rollercoaster exhilarating and oddly soul quenching here. If Tom Jenkinson’s schizoid rave electronica is no longer quite as pioneering, that’s just fine, for this is his peculiar sonic palette to refine and explore. It doesn’t need to shift the world, but to add something to it, and Be Up a Hello is a rather thrilling addition.

“Oberlove” squelches bass and tinkles rapid processed hi-hats. It’s the too intense joy of having yourself turned inside out or peeling your face off in a mirror. All dreaming of course, but very real in the moment. Firing through the hardcore continuum, “Nervelevers” stalks haunted rave warehouses like some video game version of Burial; moving between multiple realities via revolving doors transplanted from 1980s department stores.

Pulling back from the frantic drill n bass rhythms, “Detroit People Mover” is a machine-made love theme of stolen moments within a lived-in sci-fi dystopia. Think Blade Runner or the future scenes of The Terminator when hope is at its most stripped away, but something deeper breathes through nevertheless. Meanwhile, “Mekrev Bass” edges in with electronic groans before kicking up the dark with steely breaks and beats. Imagine stalking the perpetual night of spaceship corridors, the hunter not the hunted.

The most spooked piece here – and a standout otherworldly transmission in any company – “80 Ondula” is held back for the finale. A vast alien cathedral houses a living organism that attempts to communicate via a series of drones containing echoes of previous realities. The organ player as living god unable to speak to creatures beneath its vast intellect. “80 Ondula” is that sense of being trapped inside of a stretched-out loop; the beginning is the end is the beginning. Punctuated by bass pulses and riding waves of getting-pulled-into-a-black-hole calm, its almost six minutes should by rights go on for always.

www.warp.net/squarepusher